Expert: Laurie McLauglin - 8/24/2010

Question
Hi I have a few questions about buddhism.

1. Is it okay to have sex before your married?

2. Is there any prays you can say?

3. is there any way to get forgivnes if you brak one of the five rules?

4. One of the five rules says that you can't destroy living creatures. Would it be okay to kill an animal if it would help you survive?

I hope that you can answere my questions:)

/Isa

Answer
Hello Isa

Thank you for letting me answer your questions.

These are good questions.

To the best of my knowledge, the Buddhists do not have any rule about whether it is all right or not all right to have sex before marriage. What is important to Buddhists, as far as I know is that our actions of body, speech and mind cause no harm to others or ones self and if our motivation for our actions of body speech and mind are good.

If our motivations are positive and we are causing no harm of body, speech and mind in our actions, then generally, there seems to be nothing wrong with having sex before marriage.

As far as what prayers we can say, there are many, many prayers we can say both general prayers and specific ones. If you would write to me and let me know what kind of prayers in general you are interested in, I will be happy to answer you.

When you say the five rules I assume you mean the five precepts of 1) no killing, 2) no stealing, 3) no sexual misconduct 4) no lying and 5) no intoxicants.  

If you break any of these five precepts, the best way to get forgiveness from a Buddhist perspective is to apply the 4 opponent powers.
First one should have remorse for one's actions; acknowledge to ones self that one did something that was not positive and and generate sincere remorse for those actions.  This does not mean guilt, but actually thinking about how what you did has hurt another person.  Buddhists believe in reincarnation and so we believe that all sentient beings have been our caregivers in previous lives. So we create remorse because we caused someone to suffer who had in the past been so kind to us. And then we create remorse for ourselves because we created a negative action that can ripen in the form of negative karma in the future and cause us to suffer.

Then we generate the power of resolve. We resolve that for a period of time that we feel we can manage, we will refrain from doing that action again. If we think we can refrain for a week, then we resolve to refrain for that time.  If we feel we can honestly only refrain for a day, then we resolve to refrain for that time. We do not resolve to refrain from doing something bad forever because we usually cannot keep that promise to ourselves.  So better to resolve to make a promise we can keep and rejoice in that then make a promise that we end up breaking and then when we break it, we have something else to feel bad about

Finally, we decide to rely on or renew our reliance on something that we can use to help us improve our lives so that we can perhaps not make the same mistake again. This can be God, or Jesus or in the case of Buddhism, the Three Jewels, Buddha, Dharma and Sangha.

Then there is the power of remedy.  There is a remedy to commit ourselves to a practice which alleviates the results of the actions we have done. This is often the practice of doing some sort of practice. Often we do the hundred syllable Vajrasattva mantra. By doing this mantra with the right motivation, this helps us to purify our actions and brings us closer to the qualities of Vajrasattva which are the qualities of purifying our own actions and bringing us into alignment with doing more positive actions than negative ones.

So, if one breaks one of the five precepts, or any other vow one has taken, applying the four opponent powers helps us to refrain from doing the negative action again, gives us something to rely on to help us stop our negative actions, and to purify the negative actions that we do.

Killing another sentient being is never good. One of the most important thing that determines the severity of the karma one receives from an action one does is the motivation behind the action.

So, if you killed something so that you, yourself would survive, by and large, you would still incur some negative karma from the killing. If you killed another sentient being so that you could survive and were angry while you did it for example, you would incur more negative karma than if you killed another sentient being to survive but had regret or compassion while you were killing the other being, you would incur less negative karma. If you killed them because it was easier than other options, then you probably would incur more negative karma than if you had exhausted all your options and the only option left was to kill them in order to save yourself, you would incur karma but it would be less.

If you killed another sentient being because you felt you were more important than they were, that might not be a good motivation.  Everyone thinks they are more important than everyone else in the world.

When we advance in our practice, we can begin to let go of thinking that we are the most important person in the world.  If we get in a situation where it was between us and a mother with young children, then are we more important than that mother?  As we grow in our practice, we gain wisdom which will help us make difficult choices and even ones where we realize that it might be more wise for us to let go of our own lives then the life of the sentient being who is trying to kill us.

I hope these answers helped a bit.  If you have any further questions don't hesitate to ask.

Namaste

Laurie